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Foreign policy scholars often assume that leaders pursue a national interest. However, states often spread their foreign policy authority thinly across bureaucracies and programs with overlapping or conflicting interests. This is especially pronounced in foreign aid, which serves a clear foreign policy purpose but is often mired in bureaucracy. Why is foreign aid often so fragmented? Focusing on the United States, I explain foreign aid fragmentation as a byproduct of domestic politics. When moderate legislators are ideologically diffuse, leadership must persuade them to support a foreign aid agenda by offering pet projects. This increases aid's fragmentation. In contrast, when moderates are relatively homogeneous, leaders can gather support through more traditional compromise, decreasing the need for fragmented pet projects. I test this theory using a mixed-methods approach, employing a novel agency-level dataset of US foreign aid appropriations and a case study of a 1992 act delivering aid to the former Soviet Union.

AbstractWhy do some states comply with international agreements while others flout them? In this article, I introduce a previously unconsidered explanation: bureaucratic structure. I develop a rational choice model examining the impact of bureaucratic structure on compliance, suggesting that the existence of several distinct bureaucracies can mute compliance with an international agreement by insulating some bureaucrats from pressure to comply. I examine this theory through newly coded data on a 2001 OECD agreement designed to decrease the percentage of aid that is "tied" to donor‐state products and services—a practice that is popular among special interests but which decreases foreign aid's effectiveness. I find that non–development‐oriented bureaucracies, such as departments of interior, labor, and energy, were significantly less likely to comply with the agreement than traditional development bureaucracies. This aggregates to the state level as well, where states with many aid agencies were less compliant than states with a streamlined bureaucracy.

Scholars and policymakers have long agreed that the fragmentation of foreign aid impedes its effectiveness as a tool for foreign policy and international development. Nevertheless, many countries continue to obstruct their own foreign policy goals by spreading aid across multiple independent agencies with overlapping and sometimes conflicting agendas. Given how much the literature has said about the drawbacks of foreign aid fragmentation, why do many countries break up their aid rather than centralizing it through one large agency?In this dissertation, I argue that foreign aid fragmentation is not a conscious policy choice; rather, it is a byproduct of bargaining and vote-buying within legislatures. Precisely because foreign aid is not politically popular or salient, lawmakers promoting aid legislation often face a struggle to attract votes. One solution is to channel foreign aid funding through specialized agencies that appeal to specific legislators who may not otherwise favor a bill, resulting in bureaucratic overlap and inefficiency. I develop a spatial model of vote-buying and test its derived hypotheses on foreign aid fragmentation through several angles in four empirical chapters.First, using the US case, I find that foreign aid is more fragmented when the preferences of parties are far apart and the majority party is heterogeneous. In these cases, the particularistic interests of moderate majority party members result in specialized provisions that create fragmentation. I introduce a novel measure of foreign aid fragmentation and use it to test these hypotheses. Second, I trace the mechanisms of the theory in the creation of the 1992 FREEDOM support act. I find that moderate legislators were able to withhold their support for the bill in exchange for funding of their pet projects. This led to a more fragmented aid environment.Finally, I extend the model in two separate chapters. First, I show that divided party government plays a role in fragmentation by limiting substitute bargaining tools. Second, using a cross-national sample, I show that countries with plurality electors systems, which tend to create incentives for legislative vote-buying, also have more fragmented foreign aid budgets. This provides further evidence that aid fragmentation comes from legislative bargains.

"The Diversification of Deterrence: New Data and Novel Realities" published on by Oxford University Press.

Abstract
This paper introduces new data on the creation of subsidiary bodies (SBs) by members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) between 1972 and 2020. Delegation to SBs is one of the principal means through which the UNSC acts, and these bodies are designed to carry out crucial functions such as peacekeeping, implementing sanctions, and investigating crises. Yet, no research has systematically evaluated their creation, design, and use. Our dataset includes a typology of all proposed and created SBs as well as information about their purpose and design. After introducing the data, we empirically analyze the determinants of SB creation. Multivariate regression demonstrates that SBs are more likely to be created when the preferences of the permanent members are aligned. Moreover, stronger bodies are more likely to be created during periods of high preference alignment, while middle- and lower-strength bodies are less influenced by member alignment. These results provide unique evidence demonstrating how politics affects the choice of when and how the UNSC responds to global problems. Our data and analysis paint a picture of a more proactive UNSC than is commonly portrayed in the literature, and these data will enable scholars to further analyze UNSC action.

This paper introduces new data on the creation of subsidiary bodies (SBs) by members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) between 1972 and 2020. Delegation to SBs is one of the principal means through which the UNSC acts, and these bodies are designed to carry out crucial functions such as peacekeeping, implementing sanctions, and investigating crises. Yet, no research has systematically evaluated their creation, design, and use. Our dataset includes a typology of all proposed and created SBs as well as information about their purpose and design. After introducing the data, we empirically analyze the determinants of SB creation. Multivariate regression demonstrates that SBs are more likely to be created when the preferences of the permanent members are aligned. Moreover, stronger bodies are more likely to be created during periods of high preference alignment, while middle- and lower-strength bodies are less influenced by member alignment. These results provide unique evidence demonstrating how politics affects the choice of when and how the UNSC responds to global problems. Our data and analysis paint a picture of a more proactive UNSC than is commonly portrayed in the literature, and these data will enable scholars to further analyze UNSC action.

"Signaling in Foreign Policy" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractThe position people occupy in their social and professional networks is related to their social status and has strong effects on their access to social resources. While attainment of particular positions is driven by behavioral traits, many biological factors predispose individuals to certain behaviors and motivations. Prior work on exposure to fetal androgens (measured by second-to-fourth digit ratio, 2D:4D) shows that it correlates with behaviors and traits related to social status, which might make people more socially integrated. However, it also predicts certain anti-social behaviors and disorders associated with lower socialization. We explore whether 2D:4D correlates with network position later in life and find that individuals with low 2D:4D become more central in their social environment. Interestingly, low 2D:4D males are more likely to exhibit high betweenness centrality (they connect separated parts of the social structure), while low 2D:4D females are more likely to exhibit high in-degree centrality (more people name them as friends). These gender-specific differences are reinforced by transitivity (the likelihood that one's friends are also friends with one another): neighbors of low 2D:4D men tend not to know each other; the contrary is observed for low 2D:4D women. Our results suggest that biological predispositions influence the organization of human societies and that exposure to prenatal androgens influences different status seeking behaviors in men and women.

Abstract
How do international crises unfold? We conceptualize international relations as a strategic chess game between adversaries and develop a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over a hundred years of history. We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that ICBe has higher coverage, recall, and precision than existing state of the art datasets and conduct two detailed case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Crimea-Donbas Crisis (2014). We further introduce two new event visualizations (event iconography and crisis maps), an automated benchmark for measuring event recall using natural language processing (synthetic narratives), and an ontology reconstruction task for objectively measuring event precision. We make the data, supplementary appendix, replication material, and visualizations of every historical episode available at a companion website crisisevents.org.